


Adrift

by coffeeandchocolate



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 22:34:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9093784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandchocolate/pseuds/coffeeandchocolate
Summary: Two years after the war, Tobias reads Jake's book.





	

I morphed human.

I hadn’t done it in a long time. Not since Rachel.

My eyesight dimmed. My hearing grew weak. My feathers melted away, my beak softened and shrank, I grew. Teeth formed in my mouth. I straightened up, human, for the first time in years. Soft. Defenceless. Practically blind. It would have bothered me once. Not anymore.

I didn’t care.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to gather the courage to move. I had to do this, I knew that much, even if I couldn’t figure out why.

I didn’t want to.

But I wasn’t a coward, so I started to move. I ducked out of the alley and into the street. It was loud, even to my weak human ears. It had been a long time since I’d been around this many people, and it was all I could do not to panic.

_Your ears,_ I imagined Rachel’s voice saying. _Yours._

But they weren’t anymore, and Rachel was gone, and imagining her was probably a sign that I was losing it. I squeezed my eyes shut again, for the briefest moment, then started forward again.

I entered the bookstore.

It was easy to find what I was looking for. There was a poster emblazoned with Jake’s face, and several stacks of copies of his book piled in front of it. A few of Cassie’s and Marco’s were on either side of the stacks of Jake’s.

I picked one up.

_Animorphs._  
By Jake Berenson.  


A clerk saw me pick it up.

“It’s a great read,” she said with a smile. “It’s amazing. They all were.”

I forced a painful smile. “Yeah. Amazing.”

I bought the book, then left as quickly as I could, irrationally terrified that someone would recognize me.

* * *

I looked at the cover. The word Animorphs was in plain black text, above a picture of a grizzly, a wolf, a tiger, a gorilla, an Andalite, and a hawk, all standing next to each other. I swallowed hard and averted my eyes.

What was wrong with me? I had fought countless battles. I had spent the past half decade as a hawk. I had looked death in the face a million times. But I couldn’t look at a book.

I had an hour left before I had to demorph. I needed to start reading and stop delaying this.

I opened the book. The dedication almost made me shut it again.

_To Rachel and Tom. I’m sorry._

I forced myself to keep looking, despite the surge of the anger that had once been all I could focus on rising in my chest. What was he thinking, putting a dedication to two people whose deaths he was responsible for? What did he want, sympathy from the world? Pity?

_I was thirteen when everything changed._

I remembered that day. How could I forget? Walking home with Jake, back in the days when I had looked up to him. Seeing a spaceship. I had been excited. Young, stupid, naïve.

We had learned about Yeerks. Gotten the morphing power. Watched Visser Three eat Elfangor. And been thrown into a war that we had never really had a choice about fighting.

I kept reading, and the words started to blur with my memories, and something was making it hard to breathe, and tears were welling in my eyes, and I kept reading.

_Before Elfangor, we weren’t close, the five of us. But that night changed everything._

There were parts about him and Cassie and Ax and Marco. About Visser Three and Aldrea and Aftran and David. There were bits about everyone and everything. But all I could really focus on were the ones about Rachel and the one about me. I had to demorph and remorph twice. As soon as I was done, I continued reading.

_…I didn’t know Rachel all that well before we started fighting the Yeerks. I had known her my whole life. I knew she was smart and beautiful and determined. But when we started our fight, I learned just what my cousin was made of. She was the strongest of any of us, the most willing to do what needed to be done…_

_…Tobias was braver than any of us, going into battle. The rest of us were always in dangerous morphs – tiger, wolf, grizzly, gorilla, Andalite. Tobias? Mostly, he just went as himself. As a hawk…_

_…I remember back in school, people used to assume Rachel was kind of shallow and stuck up. They judged her because of how she looked – tall, blonde, beautiful, fashionable, popular. They didn’t know the Rachel we did. The one that was all of those things, but also smart, bold, tough, and compassionate. The Rachel who fought for their lives, for everyone’s life._

_It was more than that, though. Rachel scared me sometimes. The more time we spent fighting the Yeerks, the more she changed. She became violent, reckless, impulsive. She knew that, and she scared herself just as much as she scared me. But it wasn’t something she could just turn back from._

_Even then, though, even when she was changing into someone almost unrecognizable, she still loved Tobias.  
_

_She loved the guy trapped as a hawk. As much as he loved her.  
Rachel and Tobias, they reminded each other of who they really were. The human girl and the human guy. Just a pair of kids fighting a war. Not a soldier and a hawk…_

_…The free Hork-Bajir thought of him as their liberator. The person that saved them from the Yeerks. Jara Hamee and Ket Halpek even named their daughter after him – Toby…_

_…Before Rachel died, she didn’t say anything to me. Not even to Cassie. Just to Tobias. She told him she loved him, and she smiled while doing it. She knew she was going to die. But she still smiled at him._

_Rachel was one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. One of the only people I can ever imagine facing death with a smile. We once talked about that – how we were scared all the time, but needed to do what we did anyway and not let anyone see that fear. And she did just that. I know she must have been scared, but right then, in the moments before she died, she looked like it was any other day._

I wanted to be angry at the book, at Jake. I wanted to be furious and disgusted that he could write something like this, that he could find the nerve to write a book with so many personal details about all of us. How I felt about Rachel, how she had felt about me, was none of anyone else’s business. But I couldn’t find the energy.

I searched for the hot rage that had filled me and driven me those first few hours, days, weeks. But that was long gone. I hadn’t felt that way for a long time. Maybe the anger was still there, but it wasn’t the dominant feeling anymore. Now? I was just cold, cold and empty and tired.

I laughed a bit. Jake had written that? The guy that had tripped over his tongue trying to tell Cassie he cared about her, even when he gave us marching orders without so much as a tremble in his voice? Jake had written about how much I loved Rachel?

I rubbed my eyes wearily. Couldn’t he have just let it be?

I turned to the last page.

_I made a lot of mistakes when we were fighting our war. I did some stupid stuff, I made some idiotic decisions. I did things I regret. I killed seventeen thousand helpless Yeerks. I gave an order that got my cousin and my brother both killed. I alienated the people closest to me._

_People have called me a hero. I’m not. I’m a kid that got lucky some of the time and screwed up the rest. I was a kid that somehow became a general and tried to blame everyone that wasn’t me for it. Elfangor, for giving us the morphing ability; the Yeerks, for coming to Earth and forcing me to fight; the rest of the Animorphs, for telling me I was in charge. It wasn’t any of their faults. My bad decisions are on me. No one else._

_My name is Jake. I spent three years fighting a war, and I made the worst decision of my life, one of the worst decisions anyone’s ever made, right before we won._

_I’m Jake. I was the leader of the Animorphs, six kids that managed to beat an Empire. With every mistake, every wrong decision, I made, I tried to think if I could come up with a better one. Most of the time, I couldn’t._

_I’m still thinking._

_And I still have no idea._

I closed the book. Stared at the cover for a little while. Then I tossed it into a trash can and demorphed.

Five minutes later, I was flying high in the sky, leaving the park far behind.

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this on Tumblr quite a while back. Thought I'd put it here, too.


End file.
